Steven Erikson Quotes

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Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light.

Steven Erikson
Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.

Steven Erikson
Heed the lesson there, son.
What lesson?
Every decision you make can change the world. The best life is the one the gods don't notice. You want to live free, boy, live quietly.
I want to be a soldier. A hero.
You'll grow out of it.

Steven Erikson
The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins with love and ends with grief.

Steven Erikson
Desires should never be justified,' Tehol said, wagging a finger. 'All you end up doing is illuminating the hidden reasons by virtue of their obvious absence.

Steven Erikson
Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.

Steven Erikson
Kallor said: I walked this land when the T'lan Imass were but children. I have commanded armies a hundred thousand strong. I have spread the fire of my wrath across entire continents, and sat alone upon tall thrones. Do you grasp the meaning of this?
Yes, said Caladan Brood, you never learn.

Steven Erikson
Do mortal fools still measure the increments leading to their deaths, wagering pleasures against costs, persisting in the delusion that deeds have value, that the world and all the gods sit in judgment over every decision made or not made?

Steven Erikson
When undeniable crime had been committed, justification was the act of a coward. And it was cowardice that permitted such crimes in the first place. No tyrant could thrive where every subject said no. The tyrant thrives when the first fucking fool salutes.

Steven Erikson
An item, he said softly, his eyes on the disc, that passes without provenance, pursued by many who thirst for its cold kiss, on which life and all that lay within life is often gambled. Alone, a beggar's crown. In great numbers, a king's folly. Weighted with ruin, yet blood washes from it beneath the lightest rain, and to the next no hint of its cost. It is as it is, says Kruppe, worthless but for those who insist otherwise.

Steven Erikson
He was a man who would never ask for sympathy. He was a man who sought only to do what was right. Such people appear in the world, every world, now and then, like a single refrain of some blessed song, a fragment caught on the spur of an otherwise raging cacophony. Imagine a world without such souls. Yes, it should have been harder to do.

Steven Erikson
Play on, mortal. Every god falls at a mortal's hands. Such is the only end to immortality.

Steven Erikson
More than one philosopher has claimed that we ever remain children, far beneath the indurated layers that make up the armour of adulthood. Armour encumbers, restricts the body and soul within it. But it also protects. Blows are blunted. Feelings lose their edge, leaving us to suffer naught but a plague of bruises, and, after a time, bruises fade.

Steven Erikson
'Peace did not serve order; order served peace, and when order became godlike, sacrosant and inviolate, then the peace thus won became a prison, and those who sought their freedom became enemies to order, and in the elimination of such enemies, peace was lost.'

Steven Erikson
He was not a modest man. Contemplating suicide, he summoned a dragon.' Gothos' Folly

Steven Erikson
Such is the vastness of his genius that he can outwit even himself.

Steven Erikson
None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions! A mantle of marble hiding a crumbling core of sandstone. See how they stare at me, wondering, all wondering, at my secret wellspring of wisdom...' Let's kill him,' Crokus muttered, 'if only to put him out of our misery.

Steven Erikson
I warn you all, hatred is finding fertile soil within me. And in your compassion, in your every good intention, you nurture it.

Steven Erikson
'I can see your reasons, my love. But won't you get thirsty?' — Inscription found beneath capstone of household well, Lakefront District, Darujhistan

Steven Erikson
If dreams of flying are the last hope of freedom, I will pray for wings with my last breath.

Steven Erikson
You cannot fight unreason, and as these dead multitudes will tell you — are telling you right now — certitude is the enemy.

Steven Erikson
'This swirl of stars,' Draconus suddenly said, 'marks the plunge of light into darkness. These stars, they are distant suns, shihing their light down upon distant, unknown worlds. Worlds, perhaps, little different from this one. Or vastly different. It hardly matters. Each star swirls its path towards the centre, and at that centre is death - the death of light, the death of time itself.'

Steven Erikson
Not that freedom ensured happiness. Indeed, to be free was to live in absence. Of responsibilities, of loyalties, of the pressures that expectation imposed.

Steven Erikson
What makes a Malazan soldier so dangerous? They're allowed to think.

Steven Erikson
"You leave me without hope," Brys said.
"I am sorry for that. Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. For you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge."

Steven Erikson
He had nowhere to look for answers, and he was tired of asking questions.

Steven Erikson
What matter the colour of the collar around a man's neck, if the chains linked to them were identical?

Steven Erikson
The more civilized a nation, the more conformed its population, until that civilization's last age arrives, when multiplicity wages war with conformity. The former grows ever wilder, ever more dysfunctional in its extremities; whilst the latter seeks to increase its measure of control, until such efforts acquire diabolical tyranny.' - Traveller

Steven Erikson
Mappo Trell, I believe motivations prove, ultimately, irrelevant. Upon either side of the battlefield the face grins with blunt stupidity, even as smoke fills the sky from horizon to horizon, even as crops whither and die, even as sweet land turns to salt. Inequity ends, Trell, when no-one and no thing is left standing.

Steven Erikson
Discipline is as much facing the enemy within as the enemy before you; for without critical judgement, the weapon you wield delivers — and let us not be coy here — naught but murder. And its first victim is the moral probity of your cause.

Steven Erikson